Samsung 960 PRO 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD Full Review - Even Faster!

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Introduction:

Just under a year ago we published our review of the Samsung 950 PRO, their first foray into NVMe SSD territory. Today we have a 960 PRO, which strives to be more revolutionary than evolutionary. There are some neat new features like 16-die packages and a Package-on-Package controller/DRAM design, all cooled by a copper heat spreading label! This new model promises to achieve some very impressive results, so without further delay, let's get to it!

It looks like we are getting very close to the theoretical limit of the M.2 interface. What's going to happen after that. Add in cards on x8 on the consumer side or are we just going to see stagnation for the next few years like we have with SATA 3.0 SSDs

Higher capacities, faster flash and controllers. If you can set aside the megapixel race that has been going on to achieve 'max' figures, the new race is going to be achieving higher throughputs at lower queue depths. If you check out the QD Weighted results, you'll see there is still plenty of room to go before saturating PCIe 3.0 x4.

(I've been scouring the Internet for news of similar cards, but the 3840A is the only one with published specs.)

Some x16 cards support four NVMe ports, but they are
"pass-thru" designs that only support software RAID arrays
and, as such they are not bootable.

Some x16 AOCs support four M.2 ports on-board,
e.g. Dell, HP, Kingston, the "Squid": but those
are also pass-thru designs that can only boot
from a single M.2 (no RAID support).

Intel's DMI 3.0 link has the same upstream bandwidth
as a single NVMe M.2 port, so there's little to be gained from a RAID-0 array that is downstream of that DMI 3.0 link:
possibly an increase in average WRITE speeds.

Medium term: more NVMe RAID controllers, with either x8 or x16 edge connectors. The x16 edge connector is more "elegant" because it maps neatly to four x4 lanes.

My intention was to include some SATA products in the comparisons, but the 960 PRO was so fast that it explioted a bug in my code that required recompiling my tools and starting testing over, which was a shame because I had 60+ devices tested over the past several weeks. The four products in this review are the first four to complete the revised suite. More will follow shortly in additional reviews. I have a backlog of reviews to crank out as I can get additional samples tested.

If you do anything above light browsing, you'd probably notice a difference over an 850 EVO, but I would recommend holding off for the 960 EVO, which is supposed to be similarly competitive on price but should offer greater performance than the 950 PRO.

Probably any ssd (sata or nvme) will improve anyone's computing experience over an hdd, but at what point do "regular" users no longer need to bother with faster SSDs?

And how far up the prosumer ladder do you have to climb in order for nvme drives (and particularly a beast like the 960 pro) to have an impact on one's experience?

For instance, I wish I could make Photoshop and SourceTree (git) faster and snappier, and task manager does show them as taxing the disk to a considerable extent, but at what point am I just wasting money unless I spend my days extracting 50GB archives for the sake of testing my new SSD's performance?

If you see your disk as more of the limit (vs. CPU thread saturation) for a given workload, then you should see an improvement with the faster SSD. Moving from any SATA to a 960 PRO is likely going to double to triple all of the storage metrics. It will probably shift the bottleneck back onto the CPU for anything that was previously storage limited.

We ran out of time to evaluate it as our sample arrived on Friday and we still do not have updated drivers or Magician software, but here is what was provided to us:

Advanced data encryption
The 960 PRO provides the same data encryption features as other Samsung SATA SSDs. Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) security technology will help keep data safe at all times. It includes an AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption engine to ensure that your personal files remain secure. Being hardware-based, the encryption engine secures your data without performance degradation that you may experience with a software-based encryption. Also, the 960PRO is compliant with advanced security management solutions (TCG Opal).
* Supporting eDrive(IEEE1667) is under consideration

Completely understandable, I was just wanting to make sure that we would eventually see follow-up on the topic. I know that a number of people, myself included, are upset that we're >1 year in and still don't have eDrive support on the 950 Pro that was originally promised, so I remain hopeful they will be taken to task on the topic. :)

It's on my list. Ryan is out of town and I couldn't locate our FLIR. Also, the testbed was crunching away on comparison samples and I didn't want to interrupt / restart a run. I will say that normal use on a 950 PRO doesn't heat it up enough to throttle, so it's safe to say there is even less concern on the 960 PRO.

When you get to it, and if you have the time, and if you think it is interesting, I would be really interested in the way the drive behaves in a confined environment like on the back of an ITX motherboard, with nearly zero airflow.

Just to clarify, the case I have in mind is the A4-SFX, which has the GPU on the other side of the thin metal sheet. I'm worried that temperature at that location will be high enough (from the CPU and GPU heat) that the drive will always throttle. The throttling method can itself be interesting, if it is well managed and stable or very erratic.

Again, I understand this is a niche question, please ignore it if you think the audience is too small. In that case I will investigate myself once I get the case.

That's actually the conditions you'd need to risk overheat on this one. Normal use doesn't get these things much higher than warm, as they are idle most of the time. The faster performing ones actually heat up *less* with the same intermittent workload, since they complete the requests faster and return to idle state quicker.

Thanks will keep an eye out for update. I have a 950Pro in my PC which I mostly use for photo editing(raw editing, and macro stacking) and development work with VMs. In last year of ownership of that SSD only time I had issues with thermal throttling were during summers here in west India when temps crossed 45 Deg C(Antec Spot cool took care of that). I remember Samsung pointing out to that copper labels in press release of 960 Pro so just was curious how effective that solution has been for Samsung.

If the enclosure does not contact the top side of this M.2 SSD, perhaps a custom thermal transfer pad could be added without doing any harm?

The 2.5" storage "ecosystem" is ubiquitous now, so this Syba enclosure looks like a really good way to cool these high-performance M.2 SSDs.

Of course, this solution also requires compatible cabling, which will increase the cost; but, the added cooling may be worth it.

In my mind, I'm building a RAID-0 array with four of these Syba enclosures, four compatible cables, and the RocketRAID 3840A NVMe RAID controller. This is ITEM #1 in my wish list to Santa Claus next December :)

Assume another 10% aggregate overhead
from a RAID-0 array of four of these SSDs:

3460 x 4 x 0.90 = 12,456 MB/second

PRETTY AMAZING! 12.4 Gigabytes per second (!!)

Even if the aggregate controller overhead is more,
approaching a raw READ speed of 10 GB per second
is right in the same ballpark as DDR3-1600 DRAM:

1600 x 8 = 12,800 MB/second (raw bandwidth)

Conclusion: we have now reached a new era
in which mass storage is capable of performing
at close to the same sequential performance
as volatile DDR3 DRAM. Four such M.2 SSDs
in RAID-0 mode == ~8TB (before formatting).

File creation was limited by the legacy tool that created the files. File copy effectively made duplicates of the same files on the same drive - something that people generally don't do. It was time to move on. 600p still looks to be plenty good for the money.

"•Hexadecimal Die Packages" really this is a bit overboard with the technobabble for technobabble's sake! Why not just say 16. Really 0x000F die packages man those marketing monkeys! What's next everything in octal that would be 17 in octal!

Great article, Allyn! Got a few questions about the new testing suite. In the article you said that current testing tools are not well suited for hybrid SSD's. How do you create a new suite? Do you program it yourself or do you use different tools?

I'm curious about it because the SSD reviews at PC Perspective are by far the best and most in depth. Most of the other review sites use "standard" tools like ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD etc.

The code is in-house. It started with the work I did to get Latency Percentile results (which no benchmark does), and evolved into the need to apply custom workloads that better relate to how caching SSDs behave in real-world use. The workloads were designed from taking captures, but they are not playbacks of those captures. Think of it as synthetic trace, tuned to complete in a reasonable amount of time but with more realistic idle periods than an idle-cropped trace playback.

ATTO and ASSSD only test a small in-place file, with no adjustment for how allocated (full) the SSD is. Most people just run them on a fresh out of the box empty drive, and after looking at the results of this new suite, I've come to learn that empty SSDs tend to go much faster than even partially full ones.

I recently picked up the PM961 M.2 Nvme for £99 here in the UK. I believe this is the OEM version of the 960 EVO. Can you tell me if there are any differences between the two and could I use the driver for the 960 EVO and would it make a difference at all.

The 950 PRO driver is really just an optimized NVMe driver. The one that comes with Windows doesn't handle higher performing SSDs as well as it could. I haven't tried that driver on the PM961, but it should in theory work and might give it a bit of a bump in random write speeds.

Hi Allyn,
Nice to see where your heading with the test suite.
First things I look at with a SATA boot drive are-
1.Min of 8K iops read at QD1
2.Must be able to sustain 200MB write after the buffer.
(can't have it bottleneck my spinning rust)

Becoming difficult to find in the midrange now with small drives (128-256) the TLC race to the bottom-suspect we're
going to see worse once Ram-less drives hit-thro by next year
we might see the end of planer TLC...........................

"Conclusion: we have now reached a new era
in which mass storage is capable of performing
at close to the same sequential performance
as volatile DDR3 DRAM. Four such M.2 SSDs
in RAID-0 mode == ~8TB (before formatting)."

My take on it would be a less ambitious 2 drive raid 0 of 512gm 960 ssds.Best performing and cheaper.

I dunno the numbers for ram bandwidth. a lot better am sure. not sure thats a deal breaker for my argument.

point is, 7000/4400MB are numbers in a league of their own compared to anything before - even in the server world. Its a new paradigm for coders.

ok, using it for virtual memory isnt as fast as real memory, but shit its big. I dunno enough about architecture etc., but a TB of ram may open many possibilities for completely new approaches to old coding problems.

the killer benefit of ssdS was fast random access. It transformed our PCs.

~150MB ps sequential was livable, access times were the killer on HDDs performance.

As many have said re the 960, more of the same will be barely noticed by many.

give a gamer 1 TB of passable virtual memory, and apps which use it, then that could be revolutionary.

it bears repeating btw, that IOPS has shown even more stellar performance gains in the 960, and I imagine thats important for virtual memory. As we hear, many consider this the main reason to spend the extra for the 960 over the 950.